ECM New Series Releases

Messiaen: Méditations Sur Le Mystère De La Sainte Trinité (ECM New Series 1494)

| Tyran Grillo

Olivier Messiaen
Méditations Sur Le Mystère De La Sainte Trinité

Christopher Bowers-Broadbent organ
Recorded June 1992, Hofkirche, Luzerne
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.
–Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Music”

Composer, teacher, and ornithologist were just a few of the roles adopted by Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) in his lifetime. Yet it was as organist that he seems to have felt most at ease. Messiaen carved his own niche through an increasingly “linguistic” approach to the instrument, such that every piece became another entry in a catalog of semantic impressions. In his 1969 Méditations Sur Le Mystère De La Sainte Trinité (Meditations on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity), Messiaen inaugurated a technique he termed “communicable language,” whereby full statements—in this case, culled from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas—were directly encoded into music. Messiaen was also synaesthetic (that is, he attributed colors to specific notes) and used this ability to paint audible pictures that perhaps found traction on his mental canvas alone. The mechanics of this 75-minute work have therefore been the subject of much debate around the issue of comprehensibility—i.e., whether or not the invisibility of its sonic messages undermines the intent thereof. In spite of the detailed paratext in which the work is couched, we are left with a daunting tangle of musical narrative to tease apart.

Divided into nine parts, Méditations acts as a mosaic of psycho-spiritual tropes and their representative forms. Messiaen gives his own commentary for each, summarized as follows:

I. the mystery of the begotten
II. birds and garden
III. one’s relationship not only with God, but in God
IV. “He is”
V. color; God as Father
VI. the Word; the light of humanity
VII. communicable language
VIII. divine attributes; a desire for wings
IX. “I am that I am;” garlands

Every moment feels played rather than composed, and Christopher Bowers-Broadbent captures the music’s spontaneous qualities with delicacy and tasteful drama. Turbulent chords speak of inner turmoil while “thinner” threads (such as can be found in Part II) constitute an altogether different strand. Some especially turbulent turns of phrase (Part IV) speak of an openness to one’s struggle with the idea of perfection. More protracted ruminations like Part V stretch the limits of their mortality, almost slipping from the page in the process. Part VI ends with a noticeably massive statement. Like a heavy metal power chord, it cuts to our core, shaking the ribcage and its resident heart. The final passages of Part VIII are some of the most beautiful to be found. Part IX is the galaxy on a pinhead, tearing through the cosmos with the air of one possessed, concluding with the song of the yellowhammer (a bird native to Europe and Asia).

These are about as far as one can get from Sunday morning hymns, though they are no less inspiring in their solitary way. Like the leviathan nature of transgression, the whole of this music spills over into destructive territories, all the while maintaining its central integrity. Messiaen’s is a world concerned with negative space, a world where the body fragments through music, filling worship with its own ceremony. So much of the music we associate with the cathedral is consonant beyond reproach, bringing out challenging harmonic relationships selectively and for italic effect. But here, we find the opposite: a multi-dimensional universe that turns in on itself, finding new paths in the miniscule, where human breath is mediated through an instrumental force so great that is must be bound to a single performer. With every pull of a stop, every change in register, we are brought into the aphasia of inspiration.

One cannot rightly imprison this work under one label. It is by turns magisterial and vulnerable. In showing us as much, Messiaen seems to remind us that apocalypse has nothing to do with fire and brimstone, but everything to do with knowing that creation cannot sustain itself without death. Thus does every gesture indicate an organic structure, every textual cluster a new chemical compound to be savored upon the aural tongue. The organ provides both composer and performer with a vocabulary in which crushing shouts and ethereal whispers play an equal part. It is an actionist approach to music, one in which pathos is dismantled and thrown at our feet in a heaping pile of meticulously crafted ecstasy. And wherever ecstasy reigns, so too do its attendant vices, each more melodically compelling than the last.

Pragmatically speaking, this is nothing more than an album of long meandering organ works that may turn off more listeners than it captivates. There would seem to be no thematic continuity, except for perhaps its rootedness in the sacred. Yet a dive into its fractured world yields a trove of sunken virtues. Messiaen has fearlessly plumbed the depths of his own misgivings, leaving us with a temperamental portrait of the Christian life. Gone are the universal(ized) gestures of Bach, the finely cast nests of Vierne, the porous processions of Reger, the playful romps of Karg-Elert. Here is an organ aware of its own body, as fleeting as those who wring from its innards the cacophony of our unrequited desires.

Upon listening to this album, I am left asking myself: What is a meditation? Is it an abandonment of one’s immediate reality? A total commitment to the psycho-spiritual path? For many, it requires silence, a total lack of physical disturbance, and absolute clarity of mind, while others see it as a challenge to aspire to in the midst of all distractions. For Messiaen, it would seem to be a willingness to complicate one’s faith in a reductive world.

<< Andersen, et al.: If You Look Far Enough (ECM 1493)
>> Bowers-Broadbent/Leonard: Górecki/Satie/Milhaud/Bryars (ECM 1495 NS)

The Hilliard Ensemble: Codex Speciálník (ECM New Series 1504)

| Tyran Grillo

 

The Hilliard Ensemble
Codex Speciálník

David James countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
John Potter tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Recorded January 1993, Stadtkirche Gönningen
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

While the members of the Hilliard Ensemble have nary a stumble in their entire ECM track record, with Codex Speciálník they have left one of their most lasting footprints. Recorded during a veritable golden age of the ensemble’s relationship with the label, the album extracts its material from the eponymous “special songbook,” found in a Prague monastery and dated to around 1500. Said manuscript encompasses a wide array of music in two to four parts from composers renowned and arcane, if not unknown, and proves to be a rich source of Renaissance polyphony. The more compelling pieces tend to be anonymous, such as the Exordium quadruplate that opens the Hilliards’ carefully handpicked program. Its lilting quality speaks for the whole, weaving its lines with deceptive fluidity. The hymn-like In natali domini is especially uplifting in its evocation of the nativity and is sung in block chords with occasional chromatic ornaments. Yet the most striking tracks would have to be the expertly constructed duets (the anonymous Congaudemus pariter and Salve mater gracie; Petrus de Grudencz’s Presidiorum erogatrix). The sheer scope of their implied space is awe-inspiring to say the least. It is as if they were the seeds of farther-reaching compositions with invisible roots. Other pieces by Grudencz, and especially his Pneuma eucaristiarum, make for some of the album’s most touching moments, while the gorgeous Chorus iste of Johannes Touront exhibits a captivating interplay of registers. Another treasure is the Missa Petite Camusette, of which the Kyrie and Gloria are the most invaluable. Finishing the album is Josquin Desprez’s unbelievably gorgeous Ave Maria setting, performed here to perfection.

The Hilliards never fail to bring a measured passion to their performance style. Their individual commitment is palpable in every pitch-perfect moment (note, for example, Rogers Covey-Crump’s divine intonations in the Sophia nascitur and David James’s soulful restraint in the Magnum miraculum). An album like this allows us to appreciate the development of music in new ways. We see in it the heart of an unfathomable corpus, only the skin of which we recognize, even as we discover an undeniable part of who we are in its circadian rhythm.

<< Ketil Bjørnstad: Water Stories (ECM 1503)
>> Arvo Pärt: Te Deum (ECM 1505 NS)

Bach: 3 Sonaten für Viola da Gamba und Cembalo – Jarrett/Kashkashian (ECM New Series 1501)

| Tyran Grillo

J. S. Bach
3 Sonaten für Viola da Gamba und Cembalo

Kim Kashkashian viola
Keith Jarrett cembalo
Recorded September 1991, Cavelight Studio, New Jersey
Engineer: Peter Laenger

The exact dates of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord are contestable. We do know they were composed sometime in the 1740s, making their unity as a set tenuous at best. Still, on their own, they glisten with the genius that bore them. Though more commonly played on the period instruments for which they were written, one may still find the occasional cello filling in. On this recording, we find a unique substitution in the viola, which shares hardly more than a name with its predecessor. This is accomplished by transposing any notes below the viola’s range, making for a relatively buoyant sound. Purists take note: this is, in my humble opinion, the finest interpretation of these much-recorded sonatas. Admittedly, this opinion is as much informed by the fact that it is the first I ever heard of these works as it is by the stellar musicianship that follows Keith Jarrett and Kim Kashkashian wherever they go.

The opening Sonata in G BWV 1027is a warm embrace of Baroque elegance. Jarrett captivates from bar one, his continuo providing bold bass lines as Kashkashian’s deeply sustained tones guide us through foggy waters. The second movement, while airy enough, manages to support its fill of weighty trills and rhythmic spontaneity. The Andante establishes an even tighter bond as Kashkashian dots the i’s and crosses the t’s of Jarrett’s solid arpeggios. A rather bold intimacy is maintained throughout, lending the movement an almost orchestral fullness. It is at such moments—i.e., those where expansive instrumental coverage is implied through rudimentary means—that Bach’s creativity sparkles. This tightly knit synergy carries over into the final movement as the viola harmonizes with Jarrett’s sharply syncopated left hand before doing the same with his right. The harpsichord then takes the lead as the viola provides further diacritical accents to a smooth finish.

The lush Adagio that begins the Sonata in D BWV 1028 glows like a dying fire. It dangles on an unresolved note before diving headlong into the magisterial Allegro that follows. Another beautiful Andante awaits, this time led strongly by the viola, again harmonizing with the left hand, while another confident lead-in to the final Allegro births contrapuntal bliss.

The real tour de force here, however, is the Sonata in G minor BWV 1029 that closes out the trio. The angled playing of the opening Vivace describes an exultant rejuvenation. The viola seems to find purchase in every nook and cranny carved out by the harpsichord in anticipation of the potent repeat; every precisely measured note of the Adagio sends off vibrations of the utmost gorgeousness; and the concluding Allegro is introduced by a fibrous dance which is immediately spun by the viola into an indestructible c(h)ord. The riveting descending motif at the end rings in the heart long after its completion.

The range of sound from Jarrett and Kashkashian impresses as the powerful duo navigates Bach’s intricate contours with active precision and an overarching sense of freedom. Kashkashian’s warm, sandy tone meshes so well with Jarrett’s lively harpsichord that one would seem the symbiote of the other. Upbeat tempos and a gracious resistance to filler material clock the album at a modest 39 minutes. But with such enthralling music to be had, captured at the height of passion, the urge to listen afresh is only intensified. Easily one of ECM’s finest New Series releases, and a resilient exemplar of the label’s fresh take on the tried and true.

<< Jan Garbarek Group: Twelve Moons (ECM 1500)
>> John Abercrombie: November (ECM 1502)

Leonidas Kavakos/Péter Nagy: Ravel/Enescu (ECM New Series 1824)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Maurice Ravel/George Enescu

Leonidas Kavakos violin
Péter Nagy piano
Recorded March 2002 at Radio Studio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The phenomenally talented Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos, one of the finest of his generation, is joined here by Hungarian pianist Péter Nagy for their debut ECM program paralleling Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) and his underrated contemporary, George Enescu (1881-1955). Although the two studied and performed together, Enescu was more widely known for his gifts as violinist and teacher (Yehudi Menuhin and Arthur Grumiaux were among his distinguished pupils) than as composer. Yet in the latter role he showed immense fortitude and an inventive interest in the folk music of his native Romania. His sadly overlooked Impressions d’enfance, op 28 (1940) is a revelation. Through a series of redolent images, each of its ten impressions, replete with all manner of programmatic effects, recreates a compelling story of remembrance. Titles such as “Brooklet at the Far End of the Garden,” “Cricket,” and “Storm Outside, in the Night” provide just enough descriptive information to immerse ourselves in their distinct atmospheres. Such cues ensure that the fragments of youth remain bound to the present by reflection—thematized, if you will, through the act of performance. The violin constantly doubles itself, as if trying to make its voice heard in this regard, while any lingering innocence fades into the more soluble fears of adulthood. Enescu’s better-known Sonata No 3, op 25 (1926) on popular Romanian themes receives an equally impassioned treatment. It is a folk-infused space in which dances exist only as memories, dissolving into blurs of skin and cloth. And though their spirit clearly animates the powerful final movement, it is in the second—marked, aptly, Andante sostenuto e misterioso—where the respective skills of the musicians become clearest. Where Nagy feels smooth, ceramic, Kavakos glistens with the dull sheen of wetted metal. Like a song heard through the trees, their combined forces entice as much as they perplex.

Bookending these standard-setting renditions are two major works of Ravel. The Sonate posthume (1897) sustains the graceful delicacy he is known for. As I listen, the leaves are just beginning to change outside. And so the music becomes a looming tree, its branches splayed like a frozen explosion, every gust of wind playfully recorded on strings and keys. Throughout this piece, the piano takes charge in introducing thematic changes, from which the violin may leap in a series of interpretive gestures. The two are given clear separation, as if to draw further attention to their courtship. On the other side of the coin is Tzigane (1924), Ravel’s singular self-styled rhapsody. The title—a generic French term for “gypsy”—refers more to an exotic ideal than to any specific motif. Its rousing introductory solo is one of the defining moments of violin literature, while its high-pitched acrobatics and virtuosic lines give Kavakos plenty of opportunities to show us the scope of his tonal breadth. This is certainly of the most well-balanced recordings of this piece (at least in its chamber form) one is likely to find.

The works of both composers are undoubtedly interactive. Their melodies are like fleeting glimpses that nevertheless burn themselves into the mind. Through the act of recall, we flesh out those images with our own pigments. It is for this reason that we cannot simply label such music as “impressionistic” and call it a day. That is, of course, unless see impressionism for what it is: not a vague, insubstantial view that can only been appreciated from afar, but rather an art of potent language that paints itself in the viewer’s mind. It is memory incarnate. Whereas in the photorealism of certain composers we find ourselves with relatively little room to explore, here we encounter endless space through which to run without fear. We can trust in this music. The piano becomes the paper upon which the violin may inscribe its audio diary. Impressionism writes the same story, with one crucial difference: though we may hear the nib scratching across the surface, we see only the plumed quill writing its mirror message in the air.

Schnittke/Raskatov: Symphony No. 9/Nunc dimittis (ECM New Series 2025)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Alfred Schnittke
Alexander Raskatov
Symphony No. 9/Nunc dimittis

Dresdner Philharmonie
Dennis Russell Davies conductor
Elena Vassilieva mezzo-soprano
The Hilliard Ensemble
Recorded January 2008, Lukaskirche, Dresden
Engineers: Markus Heiland and Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“It seems that the ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away…. Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter.”
–Arnold Schoenberg

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) is another in a long line of composers who have fallen to the so-called “curse of the ninth.” And while in Schnittke’s case the curse doesn’t quite hold water (it is, technically, his Tenth when one takes his Symphony No. 0 into account), the circumstances of its completion are prime material for the lore that surrounds such configurations of creative output. Regardless of how much we believe in the numerical significance of Schnittke’s Ninth, it was the last work he ever committed to paper. That he mustered the ability to do so after suffering four strokes, which had left his right side paralyzed, makes the work’s existence all the more enigmatic. Said debilitation forced Schnittke to write with his non-dominant hand, making for a virtually unreadable score. Famed Schnittke conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky subsequently prepared, under apparently spurious authority, a “performing edition,” which Schnittke vehemently rejected upon hearing a tape of its performance. Following his death soon thereafter, the score was entrusted by widow Irina to one Nikolai Korndorf, a fellow composer who sadly died of a brain tumor before he was able to do anything with it. Irina then passed the work along to Alexander Raskatov, who felt so moved in his attempts to provide a more definitive manuscript that he added an elegiac fourth movement of sorts to Schnittke’s already monumental three in the form of the Nunc dimittis (“Lord, let thy servant now depart into thy promis’d rest”) that rounds out this landmark recording.

The visceral Andante that opens the Ninth—which, in Raskatov’s estimation, acts as a “voice from beyond”—is like a string of blocks sagging over time. Harmonies move from consonance and dissonance in fluid sweeps, their ambiguity neither inviting nor repelling us. If anything, they signal a maturity that accepts those experiences that embolden us through their difficulty as well as those that refashion us through their proverbial beauty. Schnittke preserves his special sensitivity for the orchestra, treating it at times as a solo instrument, as if each section were its own string, and at others as if those voices were so distinct that they existed only through the vast spaces that separate them. It is this constant balancing act that makes the Schnittke experience so alive with nuance, easily adapting to our changing temperaments. In such a world of sound there is no self yet stable enough to hold on to for a lifetime. There is only the constant negotiation of our own musicality and the indeterminacy that binds it. And so, when the timpani announces itself at last, it sounds less like a declamatory statement and more like the heartbeat of a feeble and weary body. The addition of a harpsichord in the Moderato as a sort of tangential continuo of times past is a perfect example of Schnittke’s asymptotic grace. It also gives the symphony a concerto-like pathos, ever offset by a cryptic aftertaste and recumbent winds. As a whole, the Ninth is dominated by scales, which take a most blatant turn at the tail end of the Moderato, during which a trumpet runs through a chromatic line (perhaps in acknowledgment of its pedagogical roots?) as a lead-in to the final Presto, where we hear this modal motif echoed in the strings, and again in the lone oboe that welcomes the harpsichord’s unassuming return. Such fundamental utterances are, I think, keys into the piece’s inner energies, and prepare us for the gentle letting down of its cessation.

Raskatov’s intriguing companion piece, written in memoriam, is scored for mezzo-soprano, men’s voices and orchestra. It opens with verses by Joseph Brodsky, a favorite poet of Schnittke’s, and imparts its remaining attentions to a text by hesychast Staretz Silouan (who ECM listeners will recognize as a name of interest on Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum). Raskatov delves deeper into Schnittke’s symphonic territory, trail-marking it with voices along the way. Brief outbursts from harpsichord and marimba, along with some Ligeti-inspired vocal articulations, lend a ceremonial cast to the glowing mood. Dense brass swellings recall Górecki’s Old Polish Music, while a watery gong and shadowy electric guitar work their way into an ending that is but a mirror image of its own intentions.

A professor once told me: “Only a fool would think the answer is the most important part of the question.” Such a statement suits the music at hand, if only because the death(s) it circumscribes are as inexpressible as my unworthy attempts to relate it to the silent reader. In this regard, the present recording may be a give and take for the Schnittke admirer. On the one hand, it lacks the conviction of, say, his often-hailed Eighth. On the other, listeners will delight in the familiar presence of his beloved harpsichord and mellifluous scoring. By far one of the most stunning ECM New Series entries, this album is a more than fitting testament to a glorious composer and an opportune introduction for another who, though not so well known, walks humbly in his shadow.

György Kurtág: Játékok (ECM New Series 1619)

| Tyran Grillo

György Kurtág
Játékok

Márta Kurtág piano
György Kurtág piano
Recorded July 1996, Mozart-Saal, Konzerthaus, Vienna
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

According to the classic formulation of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, play is a vital component of our preverbal development. As the child moves from away from mere imitation to more substantial activities in which representation plays a key role, s/he begins to develop a clearer sense of subjectivity, itself a game insofar as it requires a performance bound to both written and unwritten social guidelines. For Piaget, games can be classified as “practice” (pedagogical), “symbolic” (representational), or “games with rules.” What is most important about a game in the latter sense is that everyone involved agrees upon its parameters. This the whimsical challenge of György Kurtág’s Játékok (Games), which by its very titling and denouement seems to hollow out shelter in all of Piaget’s categories even as it sets a table upon which rules are served to be devoured. And while the task may fall upon its performers to uphold those rules throughout, this music also invites the listener to play along.

Játékok grew out of a snag in Kurtág’s own formative period, during which the seeds of this ever-expanding opus were planted. It consists primarily of miniatures, each bearing a dedication to an important figure in the composer’s life. Most hardly exceed one minute in length. Though begun as a collection of children’s etudes, not unlike Bartók’s seminal Mikrokosmos, the project soon grew into its own entity, and Kurtág found himself unable to staunch the wellspring it had uncovered. Over time it has donned more autobiographical clothing. Four pillars in the form of Kurtág’s own moving Bach transcriptions bolster these selections from eight volumes, ranging from the microscopic to the leviathan, the fleeting to the infallible. Between these are strung more pliable thematic ropes from which swings the blissful abandon that sustains them. These signposts, and especially “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit,” are thrown into fullest relief by the erratic chiseling of the two pianists. As husband and wife, György and Márta Kurtág bring their own lives to bear. Flirtations and arguments are, if you will excuse the pun, fair game here, all of which seek to reenact the stages of a life begun and ended at the piano. Theirs is a romantic performance of anti-romantic music, one that constantly trips over itself in its attempts to smile.

Játékok is an all-around delight. As an exercise in precision and trust in equal measure, it continually adapts to its own shape and self-awareness. As a veritable refinery of ideas, in it we may find plenty of jewels we might swear we’ve seen before. The recording is fresh and alive, the music even more so, and fully severs any roots it might ever have had in the avant-garde. Come to it as you are, and leave it content in knowing what you were.

<< Heinz Holliger: Lieder ohne Worte (ECM 1618 NS)
>> Shostakovich/Vasks/Schnittke: Dolorosa (ECM 1620 NS)

Arvo Pärt: Alina (ECM New Series 1591)

| Tyran Grillo

Arvo Pärt
Alina

Vladimir Spivakov violin
Sergev Bezrodny piano
Alexander Malter piano
Dietmar Schwalke cello
Recorded July 1995, Festburgkirche, Frankfurt am Main
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

When this album was first released I was already a longtime listener of Arvo Pärt and quite accustomed to experiencing his sound in large-scale form. The grandiosity of other seminal ECM recordings, such as his popular Te Deum and epic Passio, left me with a vision of a composer with vast canvases to fill. Alina changed all that when I loaded it into my CD player, only to hear the most sublime understatement to ever issue from my speakers. Says Pärt, “I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.” And indeed, this album is a mise-en-abyme of airy beauty.

Tripartite structures abound in Alina.

First, they form the guiding principle of Pärt’s musical ideology, which embraces the triad as alpha and omega. It is no coincidence, then, that the album’s title piece marked the inauguration of his “tintinnabuli style,” which has since been his calling card, as it were, in a genre-hungry marketplace. Originally a two-minute piece, its extended treatment here peels away layers of possibility residing in the score. Recorded in the presence of the composer, each repetition seeks its own segue into silence.

Second, the tracks are symmetrically ordered:

1. Spiegel im Spiegel (violin and piano)
2. Für Alina (solo piano)
3. Spiegel im Spiegel (cello and piano)
4. Für Alina (solo piano)
5. Spiegel im Spiegel (violin and piano)

This rigidity ensures that any complex posturing is shunned in favor of direct communion. Despite their sparse instrumentation, the three versions of Spiegel im Spiegel comprise Pärt’s most spacious statement ever committed to disc. Each is like an edge of his metaphorical prism, bending light into hues that one can almost taste in the listening. One might easily criticize this approach as a halfhearted attempt to fill a disc were it not for the profound indeterminacy throughout. It is in this sense that the cello in the central incarnation sighs like an exhausted organ sending its final pulses straight into the heart of a period passed in quiet humility.

Third, the album is situated at the intersection of three planes of existence: the spatial, the bodily, and the vibrational. The piano’s own resonant interior speaks precisely of its external effect, thereby establishing a striking continuity between the details of its construction and the boundless receptacle that is the listener’s mind. The music speaks, because it knows no other way of communicating. It is the voice that whispers at the edge of sleep, that ever so slightly indecipherable instinct at the heart of selfless wishes.

As I listen to this album again, the patter of raindrops outside my window provides a fitting backdrop to the sheer grace of its first arpeggios. This weather lends the music a liquid shield around every note, turning each into an earthbound droplet. Alina is filled with more emptiness than substance, all the while forming through that emptiness a substance far greater than its own vocabulary can express. It enacts a unique sort of transfiguration which, through the quietude of its own coalescence, ends up turning into itself.

<< Erkki-Sven Tüür: Crystallisatio (ECM 1590 NS)
>> Arvo Pärt: Litany (ECM 1592 NS)

Giya Kancheli: Abii ne viderem (ECM New Series 1510)

| Tyran Grillo

Giya Kancheli
Abii ne viderem

Kim Kashkashian viola
Vasiko Tevdorashvili voice
Natalia Pschenitschnikova alto flute
The Hilliard Ensemble
Stuttgarter Kammerorchester
Dennis Russell Davies conductor
Recorded April 1994
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

My first exposure to the music of Giya Kancheli, with which the composer once said, “I feel more as if I were filling a space that has been deserted,” was through Exil, which remains in my opinion the finest ECM New Series release to date. Much in contrast to the tearful beauty of that most significant chamber album, the orchestral arrangements on Abii ne viderem—drawn as they are from the same thematic sources—lend extroverted articulation to essentially “monastic” material. This music may speak the same language, but in a far more distant dialect. The Life without Christmas cycle, from which two pieces bookend the present recording, is central to the Kancheli oeuvre. Not only is it his wellspring, but it also comprises, it would seem, the overarching worldview under which he musically operates. It is the gloom of a life of displacement, the full embodiment of what Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich calls “measured gravity,” which may perhaps be likened to the heavy emptiness of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. As in said film, every gesture makes a footprint, a remnant of human presence left to sink into the submerged wasteland of a silent future.

Morning Prayers (1990) is immediately distinguished by an angelic boy soprano, whose taped voice is never fully grounded but which hovers throughout. The piano adds another haunting element, seeming to pull at the barbed ends of nostalgia even as it pushes the orchestra down a flight of descendent chords. Occasional violent moments startle us into self-awareness and only serve to underscore the power of the prayers that surround them. The most profoundly effective moment occurs when the piano echoes in a dance-like theme, the orchestral accompaniment slightly off center—a distant memory ravaged by time and circumstance.

The title of the album’s central piece, Abii ne viderem (1992/94), translates to “I turned away so as not to see.” The more one listens to it, the question becomes not what is being turned away from but what is being observed upon turning. Its paced staccato bursts are linked by a profound silence, escalating with every reiteration. This silence eventually opens into a full orchestral statement, italicized again by the piano’s audible pulse. We find ourselves caught in the middle of a larger web of sentiments, until we can no longer see ourselves for who we are but only for who we have been. Personally, I find this piece to be a touch overbearing, if only because the import of its ideas is easily crushed by the heft of its dynamic spread.

The presence of the Hilliard Ensemble rescues Evening Prayers (1991) from the didacticism of its predecessor. It is a more fully unified narrative, linked by a lingering alto flute. A gorgeous “ascension” passage marks a rare contrapuntal moment for Kancheli, while David James’s voice creates magic, ever so subtly offset by a skittering violin. Occasional bursts, some punctuated by snare drum, break the mood and ensure that our attention is held. Inevitably, the piece ends like a ship sailing into a foggy ocean, leaving behind only a blank map to show for our travels.

Don’t let any comparisons to Arvo Pärt lure you astray. Kancheli’s music, while transcendent, cannot be divorced from its rootedness in upheaval. And while this album may be filled with beautiful moments, I cannot help but feel that something gets elided in these grander arrangements. I say this with the gentlest of criticisms, and perhaps only because my first foray into this world was on such a small scale. The sound of Exil stays with me, and sometimes I just cannot hear it in any other context, and for those wishing to hear this composer for the first time I would recommend starting there. That being said, the scale of these pieces makes them no less evocative for all their historical understatements and sensitivity. And perhaps that is Kancheli’s underlying observation: that, in our current climate of convalescent ideologies, all we have to hold on to are those rare flashes of fire in which our communion with something greater has transcended the rising waters of sociopolitical corruption.

<< Egberto Gismonti Group: Música de Sobrevivência (ECM 1509)
>> John Abercrombie Trio: Speak Of The Devil (ECM 1511)

Sándor Veress (ECM New Series 1555)

| Tyran Grillo

Sándor Veress

Camerata Bern
London Voices
Heinz Holliger oboe and conductor
Recorded February 1993, Salle de Musique, La Chaux de Fonds
January 1992, BBC Maida Vale Studio, London
Engineers: Andreas Neubronner and John Whiting

I set off from my beautiful fatherland,
My little, glorious Hungary.
Halfway, I turned and looked back
And my eyes were filled with tears.

Hungarian-born Sándor Veress (1907-1992) is a sadly neglected figure in modern music. Despite his pupilage under Bela Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and even his succession over the latter as professor of composition at the Budapest School of Music in 1943, Veress has never attained the same international recognition as his two most successful compatriots. One might blame his preference for solitude or his idiomatic methodology for keeping him in obscurity. Yet as one who made the most of his outlier status and ideological exile, he seems never to have been one to wallow in self-pity. Exposed to much of the folk music that also captivated his mentors, Veress nurtured that same spirit when sociopolitical upheaval exacerbated his emigration to Switzlerland in 1949. Whereas Kodály in particular saw cultural preservation as central to the musical act, Veress saw it as an incision to be teased open and unraveled.

Veress was as much a giver as he was a receiver of compositional heritage, and himself provided valuable tutelage throughout his career to such pioneers as György Ligeti, György Kurtág, and, most significantly here, Heinz Holliger, for whom the opening Passacaglia Concertante (1961) for oboe and string orchestra was written. Veress’s fondness for the oboist extraordinaire is palpable in every measure of this impassioned recording. The first plucked string is like an idea dropped into water, from which viola-heavy interpretations issue with the force of an approaching storm. The meticulous Allegro scherzando is an enthralling realization of concise melodrama, while the relatively protracted third movement maintains a dark tension throughout, ever heightened by Holliger’s circular sustains and tonal acuity. The piece’s somber ending leaves us with much to ponder as we wander into the seven madrigals known as Songs Of The Seasons (1967). These mixed choir settings of poems by Christopher Brennan (1870-1932), an Australian poet whose lack of affiliation and anti-lyricism primes him for the clustered treatment he receives here, are rife with potent themes: dreams and the fragility of time and place, the musicality of the body as an emotive instrument, the ever ineffable springtime, sunlight as soul and its expansion into the oneness of all, and flickering images of a past love all intermingle in a playful exposition of language. The “sweet silence after bells” of Part IV is especially redolent, and in it one can hear shades of Holliger’s own vocal writing just two decades later. Where the Songs are effervescent and whimsical, the Musica Concertante (1966) for twelve strings is highly centrifugal. As a chamber work modeled after Bach’s third and sixth Brandenburg Concertos, it looks beyond its own formulaic outline even as it cowers within it, happily merging disparate streams and leaving us with a river to be reckoned with as we continue to wade against the current of an unrelenting music industry in which such voices are all too easily forgotten.

<< Terje Rypdal: If Mountains Could Sing (ECM 1554)
>> Michael Mantler: Cerco Un Paese Innocente (ECM 1556)